


LAUNCHING MERRILY DOWN THE PATH OF SIN (THE FIRST TIME)

by perennials



Series: JOIE DE VIVRE [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Dancing, Drinking, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, author's oral fixation emerges yet again, black jackal four dynamics, oh no, sleeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22832350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: "Bokuto said I should bring you home. But I don’t know where you live. So I took you here.”“To hell?”"No, Atsumu-san. To my apartment."
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Series: JOIE DE VIVRE [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1625179
Comments: 19
Kudos: 515





	LAUNCHING MERRILY DOWN THE PATH OF SIN (THE FIRST TIME)

**Author's Note:**

> chronology note: takes place before the other parts. can be read alone

“Can I have this dance?” Shouyou bows. He smiles at Atsumu from under his lashes.

Atsumu can feel his entire face going red. And his neck. And his shoulders. Probably his teeth too if his teeth could turn red. Maybe Atsumu is becoming a vampire.

“No,” he manages. Stubborn as always, you shitty proud asshole. Now you’ve gone and done it. He’s walking away already.

Shouyou is not walking away. Shouyou is straightening up and readjusting his necktie and Atsumu’s eyes are stuck on the way his fingers pluck at the glossy red material. Wouldn’t that look nice around Atsumu’s neck. That’s what he’s talking about. Just tie him up and leave him to die somewhere.

This is the bit where the camera pans to the entire room so the audience realizes they’re at some charity ball for, what was it again. Goats? Atsumu can’t remember and doesn’t really care. He doesn’t really care that they’re at a ball either given that the rest of their team is huddled around the buffet table and pointing at him and snickering. Sakusa isn’t even looking at him. Atsumu’s self-worth would take a hit from that alone if it hadn’t already been decimated several times tonight.

Shouyou tilts his head to one side. He’s been growing his hair out. His bangs fall over his eyes and Atsumu bites his lip so he doesn’t reach out to brush it aside. The pain. Oh yes. The pain.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Atsumu says without thinking, as is his usual style around Hinata Shouyou. “But. Uh. I can’t dance.”

Shouyou mulls this over. It’s a good thing they’re standing in a corner of the room because the couples dancing near the center look more like flying projectiles than people. Like battery-powered machine geese. Atsumu swallows. He wishes he’d taken a flute of something from the waiter earlier. At least he’d have something to do with his hands. And an excuse.

“Natsu taught me how to dance,” Shouyou says thoughtfully. “It’s not that hard. And I think you’ll be pretty good at it, Atsumu-san. You have nice shoulders.”

Shouyou’s been looking at his shoulders? Since when? Why didn’t Sakusa tell him about this? Atsumu’s glad he didn’t take a flute of something after all or he definitely would have dropped it. He breathes through his teeth and makes eye contact with Sakusa across the room. Sakusa gives him look number 23 which means “you’re stupid” but in a special way as compared to looks number 1 to 22, which just mean “you’re stupid”. Sakusa’s sipping at a flute of something. If he gets drunk they’re all going to see hell later.

“I,” Atsumu says, dragging his gaze back to Shouyou. He’s been struggling with this all night but he honestly has no fucking idea where he’s supposed to look when he’s talking to him. Shouyou’s suit is tailored. When he says tailored he means tailored tailored as in gorgeous. As in it’s the kind of fitted look that you could cut your lip on if you tried to kiss it. Not that Atsumu’s thinking of kissing Hinata Shouyou or anything but if he doesn’t stop staring at his lips, he thinks Sakusa might file an arrest warrant against him for being a fucking loser.

He laughs and it’s weak and a hundred percent off-key. He hates himself. “It’s hard to say no to that,” he croaks out.

Shouyou smiles like he’s won. What’s Atsumu supposed to say to this? This is the dreaded power dynamic they talk about on relationship advice forums. Atsumu can’t win against him so essentially Shouyou has won. By default.

“So,” Shouyou repeats, exuding the kind of light that the world is basked in in the moments immediately following a solar eclipse. Like what the fuck, since when was the sun this bright. My eyes are bleeding. Oh shit. I’m falling down in the grass dramatically. My legs are going numb.

“Dance with me?”

Atsumu wants to scratch at an itchy spot on his elbow but that would be a sign of weakness.

“Okay,” he says, glaring at a spot three inches to the left of Shouyou’s mouth. “Fine.”

It’s only three seconds after taking Shouyou’s hand that it occurs to him that of all the people in the room, Hinata Shouyou asked him to dance. Like is that supposed to mean something? Is he reading too much into this? Shouyou’s palm is warm and calloused and Atsumu’s soul is slipping out of its plastic packaging. It’s knocking on the gates of heaven and going: let me in, oi, I’m like this close to ascending. I’m dancing with Hinata fucking Shouyou. This must be where people who’ve done good things go when they die.

  
::

  
“No? I just wanted to dance with you,” Shouyou says when Atsumu asks. He sounds rather honest. Fuck. Is he being honest? Atsumu swivels around to look at Sakusa and Sakusa swivels away. Fucking asshole. Atsumu swivels back around to face Shouyou.

“But like.” He peels peevishly at his edamame. Why.”

“Why?”

“Yeah. Why.”

The after party had been Sakusa’s idea. Atsumu was able to ignore it at first because Sakusa was drunk and therefore possessed the volume capacity of a broom. Bokuto, sadly, is incapable of ignorance. Shouyou was thrilled to hear that Sakusa wanted to go somewhere with them voluntarily and yanked them all into the first place that sold alcohol.

They got split up because there weren’t enough seats. Bokuto won against Sakusa at scissors-paper-stone. Shouyou sat down across from Atsumu and ordered drinks while Atsumu stared at the raised wooden surface of the table and thought about his hands for the tenth time since they’d left the goat charity ball.

“I thought you’d say yes,” Shouyou says finally.

“Aa? So you asked me ‘cos you thought I was easy?”

“...Atsumu-san.”

That’s a pout. That’s definitely a pout. Shouyou’s pouting at him. How old are they again. Twenty-three? Five?

“Shouyou,” Atsumu says. He has no idea what Shouyou’s playing at but he sure as hell wants in.

Shouyou sighs. He waves his glass around vaguely. “I thought you were in love with me, Atsumu-san,” he mumbles, looking everywhere but at Atsumu. “That’s what Bokuto said,” he adds thoughtfully. “Bokuto’s psychic, y’know. You can trust him.”

Atsumu-san falls out of his chair.

  
::

  
“So are you?”

Shouyou peers over the edge of the table at Atsumu who is twenty-three this year and lying on the floor. There’s edamame on Atsumu’s chest. Shouyou doesn’t seem too concerned.

Sakusa peers over the edge of his table as well. Now when Atsumu opens his eyes Sakusa’s blank face is above him and Shouyou’s carefree smile is beneath. Atsumu feels like the frog at the bottom of the well. Over his head is the blue sky and the sun and the clouds and then two eery fucking faces, watching him wordlessly.

“I,” he says. Stops. Realizes he has nothing to say right now. Where the fuck is Bokuto? He tries to look past the hole in the sky above him. Bokuto is ordering more drinks. Who the fuck is paying for all this anyway? Who the fuck let Bokuto have this much power?

“Where the fuck is Bokuto,” he concludes. “I’m going to kill him.”

Shouyou squints at him. He looks very serious for someone who just delivered a fatal blow to his poor innocent golden retriever of a teammate. He’s also drunk. Atsumu just wants to dance with him at the goat charity ball again. Please. The floor is sticky. It’s fucking up his hair.

“Are you a virgin?” Shouyou asks.

Sakusa snickers.

Atsumu drags the heel of his palm down his face. He rolls over onto his side and closes his eyes. He’s going to pretend the shitty izakaya sounds in his ear are a lullaby and fall asleep before the waiter comes over and drags him to his feet. Otherwise he will never know peace.

  
::

  
“Surprise! It was just a dream.”

Atsumu sits straight up in bed. He’s impossibly relieved. The entire thing was a dream; of course it was. He’s a bit sad about not actually being able to dance with Shouyou but he’d trade the spectacle at the izakaya for the last twenty years of his life. He’ll find other chances to dance with Shouyou. Surely they exist.

Surely he’s awake now. Or is he?

“Are you sure,” he asks hoarsely. The room fades slowly into view. The inside of his mouth tastes like shit and Hinata Shouyou is sitting on the edge of a bed he doesn’t recognize.

“Nope,” Shouyou says, breaking into the most beautiful smile Atsumu’s ever seen as he figuratively grinds his foot into his hand. “I lied, sorry. Bokuto said I should bring you home. But I don’t know where you live. So I took you here.”

“To hell?”

“My apartment. Atsumu-san, you’re so mean.”

“I have a fucking headache.”

“Hold on, I’ll get water.”

While Shouyou vanishes into the dark eerie hallway, humming to himself, Atsumu contemplates escape. He pushes himself unsteadily off the bed and sticks his face in the window. It’s a long way down. Maybe hell was built several floors above the ground in an apartment complex in Tokyo. He sends negative karma to Sakusa in his shitty nice apartment for not picking up the slack after he blacked out. They’re supposed to be friends. They almost had something going months ago. Where has all his positive energy gone?

Shouyou taps him on the shoulder like a ghost. Atsumu wishes he were psychic.

“Water.”

“Thank you.” Shouyou leads him back to the edge of the bed. Atsumu follows.

Hands fisted loosely in the sheets. Half-lidded eyes. A bitten lip smile and the beginnings of something Atsumu lacks the mental capacity to register right now.

Shouyou tilts his head to one side. “Are you still drunk?”

Atsumu drinks. He contemplates his water. Shouyou has handed him a Hello Kitty cup.

“Probably.”

Shouyou gasps theatrically. “That’s terrible,” he declares. “I am too.”

“You are?”

“Yeah,” Shouyou confirms, leaning towards him across the bed. His hands come to rest on either side of Atsumu’s face as his sultry, unhinged expression comes into terrifying crystalline view and Atsumu’s brain begins to malfunction.

“So it’s okay if I kiss you, right?” he announces in a stage whisper.

Fisted sheets. Long lashes. Teeth.

“Yes. I think so. Yes.”

  
::

  
Later he’ll learn that most of Shouyou’s cups are made of plastic because he has a habit of bumping into things and knocking them off the table. He’ll wonder if the Hello Kitty cup was an intentional choice on Shouyou’s part. Atsumu drops it, after all, two seconds after Shouyou kisses him and then releases some kind of poison gas into his mouth that destroys all his memories of that night. Neither of them will remember a thing; not about the izakaya or the edamame or Atsumu’s tastes in bed. Bokuto won’t remember that there was something to remember. Sakusa will bring him an extra pack of sanitary wipes the next morning.

“What the fuck?” Atsumu will say, rubbing at a sore spot on his shoulder.

“Who’d you fuck?” Bokuto will ask.

“No one,” Shouyou will announce, traipsing out of the locker room. “No one fucked anyone.”

“Hinata. Don’t say fuck.”

“Why, are you a virgin?”

  
::

  
They’ll get together later. Bokuto will drag them to the Korean BBQ restaurant and Atsumu will stick his fingers in Shouyou’s mouth. We all know how that story goes. It’s a great story.

For now the world will wonder, as Atsumu does on average twice a week for the next eight months, what the fuck went down the night after the goat charity ball.

You won’t find any clues in the izakaya or Shouyou’s bedsheets or Sakusa Kiyoomi. Sakusa Kiyoomi won’t even look at you. But if you studied Atsumu’s formal tie.

If you did that. Then maybe. Just maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> this started as a twitter dialogue prompt response to "can i have this dance" but i was like holy shit i really nailed atsumu's Fool disposition so i decided to expand it and then i was like holy shit the sequel let's make this a PREQUEL. well it's a spiritual prequel. just a bit of fun really  
> i like to think hinata realizes what the fuck went down that night several weeks later but atsumu's a fucking idiot so he just goes on in life like 'he let me sleep in his bed ^_^" until hinata brings it up one day, killing him instantly. i like to think sakusa's a cute drunk. i'm going to stop using him for comedy relief soon. his time will come  
> thank you for reading! i yeeted this out of my ass in like an hour and did Not do my usual intense 39 rounds of editing so it's not my most polished piece. if nothing else i sure did have fun. i love highlighting atsumu's Foolishness. if you had fun too please consider leaving kudos and comments, but as always, do what sparks you joy. i will be around on twitter because my internship is more chill than i had expected. my exams went aight so i will be chill about my internship and twitter. i'll see you the next time i see you
> 
> have a good one


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